A hero of classical architecture comes to town

One of the most accomplished architects you’ve never heard of touched down in San Francisco Wednesday: Allan Greenberg.

He’s the designer of a Woodside mansion that changed hands this summer for $117.5 million and the restoration of the U.S. Secretary of State’s offices in the 1980s for George Schulz. He fashioned the Brooks Brothers flagship store on Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills and a computer sciences building at the College of William & Mary modeled on an 18th century English estate.

That’s Greenberg’s dark secret: He’s an unrepentant classicist, the architectural style that’s taboo on today’s skyline. But at his talk on Wednesday evening, the man revealed an open-minded appreciation for masters who pursued much different paths than his.

“As a student, Le Corbusier was my god,” Greenberg, 75, told members of the Northern California Chapter of the Institute of Classical Architecture & Art gathered at Villa Taverna in Jackson Square. “I tried to get a job with him, pestered him for months.”

While Greenberg’s talk included the obligatory slides showing ornate homes for bold-faced folks – Martha Stewart! – I was beguiled by how he came to pursue the calling of an order where “you look to the past to create the future.”

Greenberg is South American by birth and studied architecture there. After failing to woo Corbusier – “you can have a job, but I can’t pay you for a year or two until you’re of use to me,” 20th Century design’s most influential provocateur told him over lunch – Greenberg joined the firm of Danish architect Jørn Utzon and was assigned to work on the Sydney Opera House, “an amazing building.”

The Sydney Opera House: “Amazing.”(Allan Greenberg Architect LLC)

Eager to trade Northern Europe for an English-speaking terrain, but not an English outpost, Greenberg earned a graduate degree in architecture at Yale. He bonded with Paul Rudolph, the head of the school and designer of its brutalist concrete home that Greenberg appreciated because “it boiled architecture down to the essentials.”

With this background, you’d expect Greenberg to follow a much different path. Instead, in the mid-1970s he chose the road that in 2006 led him to become the first U.S.-based recipient of the Richard H. Driehaus Prize for Classical Architecture. Part of this was a business decision, he suggested genially. More lasting, he had developed a distaste for the place-razing aspects of modernism and a desire to pursue architecture that isn’t afraid of symbolism that resonates throughout time.

The work since then is heavy on private homes and academic buildings, especially for colleges that want to reinforce their sense of tradition even while plowing new educational fields. His Dupont Hall at the University of Delaware, for instance, tucks engineering classrooms and science laboratories within Georgian garb. Most idiosyncratic: a 1970s courthouse done on the cheap by reusing a Connecticut supermarket, an irony-free but self-conscious pastiche of a big box in traditional garb.

After his talk, a classical buff asked why people get distracted by modern architects such as “the latest horror story, Frank Gehry.”

Greenberg’s answer turned the question on its head – discussing how Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe understood classicism and drew on its rooted orders, even while taking it in much different directions. His thoughts about Gehry? Greenberg was too much the gentleman to say.

“The greatest thing about being a classical architect is that you have to evaluate your work in light of the great architects of the past,” he commented at the end of his formal lecture. “You’re always left wanting, but you aspire.”